Office receptionists and switchboard operators have long had to deal with the difficulties presented by keeping track of other office personnel and their messages. Often there is no system by which messages are maintained for office personnel in a central location or by which the office staff is kept apprised of the whereabouts of their superiors or coworkers. Messages are likely to be left on the recipients's desk or the receptionist verbally informed regarding personnel location.
If a device is used for maintaining messages in a central location until picked up by the recipient, it is likely to be a system of frontwardly opening rectangular compartments or pigeonholes, typically mounted on a wall. While such devices do permit an improved measure of efficiency for the message taker, they are not without their disadvantages. The units are generally bulky and cumbersome and not sufficiently aesthetically pleasing to complement the decor of most office reception areas. More importantly, since the message receptacles are open at the front, the contents of the pigeonholes tend to fall out easily and become lost. Another drawback involves the absence of any provision for the integration of relevant personnel location information so that all important information concerning messages and personnel whereabouts is provided at a glance.
The prior art also includes devices used solely for the communication of information concerning the presence or absence of office personnel. This is typically accomplished by providing a wall mounted board including spaces for the names of office personnel and means for indicating the presence or absence of personnel, such as sliding indicator signals or magnetic markers like those disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 2,951,703. These information boards increase dramatically in size as the number of people to be accounted for increases. In addition, the information communicated is limited to whether personnel are in the office or out and, if out, the expected time of return. The size and appearance of the aforementioned information boards make them awkward and cumbersome for office reception personnel to use efficiently. Moreover, these prior art personnel information boards provide no integral coordinated structure whereby message and personnel location information is quickly provided at a glance.
One known prior art unit has combined a set of pigeonholes with a personnel location board fastened along the upper surface to produce a unit smaller than those referred to above. While this unit represents an improvement over what was previously available, nevertheless it suffers from a number of disadvantages. Although intended to be used as a desk top unit, it is larger and more cumbersome than desirable for such a unit. In addition, the sliding time indicators and the arrangement of names and indicators on the board are difficult to read accurately at a glance, and there is no provision for any coordination between the pigeonholes and the information board. Because the pigeonholes are open both at the front and in the back, papers are even more likely to be lost than with a wall mounted pigeonhole unit. Although a piece of slotted metal is provided at the top of the unit for urgent messages, there is no way in which the intended recipient of such messages may be readily identified at a glance by office personnel passing by the unit. If the receptionist was unavailable or could not remember who had received such messages, these personnel would be required to go through all the messages to ascertain if one was intended for them, thus assuring that such messages could never be confidential. The primary drawback of this unit, however, lies in its failure to coordinate and integrate the functions of its structural components so that important information concerning office personnel is readily available and easily assimilated upon rapid visual inspection.